“Ah dear, dear Master”: Olive Custance’s tribute to Tennyson, October 1892

On 18 October 1892, the Eastern Daily Press printed a poem by the eighteen-year-old Olive Custance entitled “In Memoriam. Alfred Lord Tennyson”. Its six quatrains mourn the dead poet and imagine his release into a fuller life. This newspaper clipping adds a revealing early piece to the record of her poetry.¹

Alfred, Lord Tennyson had been Poet Laureate since 1850 and was one of the commanding literary voices of Victorian Britain. His death was a national event, as well as a personal loss to generations of readers. Custance’s tribute was topical in the most immediate sense: he had died on 6 October, twelve days before its appearance, and his funeral at Westminster Abbey took place on 12 October, only six days before publication.² Her poem belongs to that moment of public bereavement.

A young poet addresses her “Master”

The tone is affectionate, reverent and consolatory. Its most personal phrase is the repeated address “Ah dear, dear Master”: a young poet’s acknowledgement of a voice that had helped to form her imagination. The following lines distinguish the excitement of his early poetry, which “Stirred us so strangely”, from the gentler influence of his later work, which “Mellowed our laughter, lulled our tears”.

Custance speaks throughout for a community of readers. The land itself becomes a mourning woman, bowing “her bright head above the bier” and weeping for “her lord of song”. Public homage and private affection meet in the same image. The regular quatrains and predominantly four-beat lines give that homage a measured, accessible movement, suited to a newspaper elegy.

Born on 7 February 1874, Custance was only eighteen when these lines appeared.³ There is something touching in her adoption of the collective voice of readers who had lived with Tennyson’s poetry “in past years”. She writes as a member of an older and larger fellowship, joining her own gratitude to that of the nation.

Crossing into the light

The opening announces release rather than extinction: Tennyson has “passed into the light”; his wings are “loosed” and his spirit is “free”. Yet the second stanza immediately qualifies this assurance: “Yet must we mourn”. The hope of the dead poet’s happiness does not cancel the pain of those left behind.

“Farewell” becomes a little meditation on the word itself: “Shall you not fare for ever well?” Earthly readers give way to imagined angelic listeners. The admission that there were songs “We could not always understand” is especially attractive: admiration does not require a pretence of complete understanding. At the close, the italicised pronouns sharpen the distinction between we, who remain in doubt, and He, who sees that his work was not in vain.

The title naturally recalls Tennyson’s own In Memoriam, and the movement between grief, doubt and faith belongs to the imaginative world of that poem. But another Tennyson poem comes particularly to mind: Crossing the Bar. There, death becomes a departure across the water, beyond the limits of earthly life, with the hope of seeing “my Pilot face to face”. Custance’s “Mother-land”, her language of farewell, and the passage from mortal sight into light suggest a similar understanding of death as a journey home. She may well have had Crossing the Bar in mind.⁴

There is also something here of the atmosphere of In paradisum, the antiphon accompanying the departure of the dead in the burial liturgy: “In paradisum deducant te angeli” — “May the angels lead you into paradise.” Custance’s angels are listeners rather than guides, but the imaginative kinship is striking: earthly mourning opens upon a heavenly welcome, and separation is understood through the hope of arrival.⁵

The final stanza brings that journey to its destination. Those left behind experience fleeting time and pain; the dead poet has “wakened to the perfect day”. What remains uncertain to his readers is now clear to him: he sees that his work was not in vain.

The poem

In Memoriam.
Alfred Lord Tennyson.
By Olive Custance